Blogging about PC Games

This is my third post in a series about blogging and playing PC games.

My first blog saw the light of day in 2011. I had developed my own crude WordPress theme and had some moderate success blogging mostly about MMORPG. I actually had a few visitors and even some comments to begin with. Then it fizzled out – and half a year later, I finally killed my blog.

Four years later, I had another look at my old blog posts. I thought they were written well enough for me to revive the blog and continue. I spent half a year developing the WordPress theme you see here. I wanted it to not only look good, but also have a lot of features – many of which I don’t even use myself.

But as I relaunched in 2015, I also made a vow to myself. Don’t ever give up on the blog again.

During the years since 2015, the audience for this blog has been so limited that I would probably have killed it several times over, had I not made that vow. And it wasn’t for lack of trying to keep it going. I have written tons of impressions post about PC games, a little bit about Commodore 64 music, and some science stuff too. I also announced some of the blogs posts in various social media.

You would think that kind of persistence would have garnered an audience over time.

Probably the most disconcerting fact is that since I activated the “Like” button for blogs posts many months ago, I have only had one like. One! And the only reason I got that one was because it was a rare blog post about when I worked at Io-Interactive some years ago. 99% of my impressions posts about PC games have no comments or likes. Whenever I post those, it always feels like I’m just talking to myself.

When running Goggle Analytics to check up on how my blog is doing, it turns out that among the very few visitors I do have, most of them are only coming for SID Factory II or my old save games. A few of my blog posts about Commodore 64 music actually did get some comments, because of my past history on this home computer. So why don’t I just settle with writing about C64 stuff only?

I never wanted this to be a blog about one specific topic, least of all the Commodore 64. I wanted it to be a blog with multiple topics about whatever I wanted to write about. And that just happened to mostly be about PC games. There’s always a lot to write about almost any PC game after finishing it. I can’t say the same thing about C64. It’s an old hobby and I guess there’s really not a lot to talk about anymore.

Of course this lack of action on my blog really does get to me. It makes me sad. I actually do believe that my writings about PC games are good enough for some to find it worth their while reading it, but apart from announcing my blog posts on social media, I don’t know how to spread the word. If you have ever tried to do the same thing and don’t have a network, perhaps you know how hard it can be.

Announcing on sites like Reddit is not an option as they despise self-promotion – and there are many sites with the same opinion. I’m on Facebook, and whenever I post funny images or perhaps a new SID tune, I get a lot of likes and comments. If I dare to post a link to a blog post about PC games, I get nothing.

It almost feels like I’m cursed.

That blog series with game tropes that I started recently? It had a few likes and comments for the first blog post announcement. All subsequent blog posts in the series have had zero likes and zero comments, and I announced them all on Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon and Facebook. I even used the #blog hashtag. Maybe it was the timing? One day I made sure to only announce it at the time of day where most people are gathered on social media. That made no difference at all. Still nothing.

So I have written a lot of PC games impressions, and even later turned them into a review series with pros and cons. I called this series “Chordian’s Balanced Review” and especially had fun coming up with the bullet lists in the end. However, there are already several hundreds of professional reviews on the internet, and even more really useful reviews by users on Steam.

I know it’s just a drop in the ocean.

Sure, I’ve tried to do some things differently, like the section with spoilers where I comment on specific things I’ve found through the game. I’ve even tried to change the blog format so many times since reviving the blog in 2015, experimenting with other ways to convey the information. But it was obviously never enough to gather the audience I was looking for – and for that reason, I have made a decision.

As of this blog post, I will no longer write review posts about the PC games I’m playing.

I will stick to my vow of not killing this blog. In fact, I may still write blog posts about various topics, maybe even my personal game notes. But the bigger blog posts about specific PC games have had their chance to garner attention, and they have clearly failed. Time to wind down.

If you think I’m in the wrong and haven’t considered e.g. lurkers on RSS feed, I’d love to hear from you. Have you actually read my PC games impressions? Did you find them interesting?